Heart of Darkness

About this book

Heart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad, serialized in 1899 and published in book form in 1902. It is a frame story: a group of men wait on a yawl in the Thames estuary for the tide to turn, and one of them, Charles Marlow, tells of a voyage he once made up a great river in Africa to find a company agent named Kurtz. The river is never named, but it is the Congo, and the setting is the Congo Free State under the personal rule of King Leopold II of Belgium.

Conrad had made that voyage himself in 1890, and the book draws directly on what he saw. It is short, under forty thousand words, and has generated more commentary than almost any English work of its length. It is taught as a document of imperialism, as an early modernist experiment in narration, and, since Chinua Achebe’s 1975 lecture attacking it, as a case study in how European writers represented Africa.

The story

Marlow, an experienced seaman between jobs, obtains a post as a steamboat captain with a Belgian trading company through an aunt’s connections. He travels to the company’s station on the coast, then overland to the Central Station, where he finds his boat sunk and spends months repairing it. All the while he hears about Kurtz, the agent at the Inner Station far upriver, who sends down more ivory than anyone and whom the other employees speak of with a mix of envy and unease.

The second half of the book is the river voyage itself, with a small crew and a handful of company men Marlow calls pilgrims, toward the station where Kurtz has been out of contact for a long time. What Marlow finds there, and what he does with it when he returns to Europe, is the matter of the last section.

Themes and historical context

The Congo Free State was not a Belgian colony but the private property of Leopold II from 1885 to 1908. Its administration extracted ivory and then rubber through forced labor, hostage-taking and mutilation, on a scale that became an international scandal in the years after Conrad’s book appeared. Conrad wrote before the main exposures, and Heart of Darkness is one of the earliest literary records of what was happening there.

The novella’s method is as discussed as its subject. Marlow’s narration is delivered to an audience that is itself inside another narrator’s account, and he keeps insisting that he cannot quite convey what he saw. The famous adjectives, the fog, the sense that meaning lies just outside the story, have been read both as a modernist technique and as evasion. Achebe’s charge was that the book uses Africa and Africans as a backdrop for a European’s crisis and denies them speech. That debate is now part of how the book is taught.

Conrad was a Polish-born former merchant officer who learned English as a third language in his twenties. His prose has a density and a slightly foreign rhythm that readers either take to or struggle with, and Heart of Darkness is among the most concentrated examples of it.

Who should read it

The book is short but not quick. The sentences are long, the narration is indirect, and the action can be hard to locate under Marlow’s reflections. Readers who want a clear adventure story will find it frustrating; readers who are willing to reread paragraphs will find it one of the most carefully written short works in English. It is often assigned alongside Achebe’s essay and his novel Things Fall Apart, and that pairing is a good way to read it. An evening or two is enough for a first pass.

Edition notes

The Gutenberg transcription was prepared by Judith Boss and David Widger.